The rent is cheep, cheep, cheep

I’d call my lawyer, but he’s already signed with the squatters

My home is going condo. I’m none too happy about it. I had no say in the matter.

At first, it was just one couple. The very first spring I lived here, they arrived unannounced and moved into the rafters of the breezeway between my backdoor and my garage.

“House sparrows,” they’re called. I guess that’s because they take over your house.

When I was a kid in the Chicago area, we called them “English sparrows.” I didn’t realize this was just Midwesterners’ fancy nickname for the not-really-English Passer domesticus, literally the most common wild bird in the world.

Beak to tail, maybe 6 inches long. Weighs in at around 1 oz, about the same as a slice of bread. A bird so ordinary, Rebecca Pugh has never even featured it in her “Running With Birds” column.

You know this bird. It’s everywhere people are. Basically a born moocher, casually settling in under eaves, in gutters, or between rafters.

Also, not timid about it. The male house sparrow wants you to think he’s hot stuff, with his striking black and white throat, and sort of a bright chestnut brown Nike logo blazing off of each eye; the female has more subdued markings but the same alternating dark and bright paint-stroke wings.

It’s no small outrage that the house sparrows have taken up residence on my breezeway. The breezeway is one of the features I’ve found most charming about my 209-year-old house; I fell in love with it from the first time I saw it on the Zillow listing. A breezeway! We didn’t have breezeways where I grew up. To get from our little house to our little garage, we considered ourselves lucky to have a narrow concrete path, and whatever happened to be falling from the sky fell on your head. Rain, sleet, hail, snow, lightning — didn’t matter. No breezeway, no covering, no escape.

But now that I have a beloved breezeway, winged interlopers have interloped it.

The house sparrow hangs out in Ipswich year-round. None of this flying south for the winter business. Why spend money on a condo in Lauderdale when you have a perfectly fine breezeway in Ipswich, free of charge?

And l’amour! Oh my. These sparrows breed from late winter all the way to late summer.

Result: Every five weeks — or even less — another batch of eggs crack open, and the squawking begins: four, maybe five or more youngsters demanding grub. Or in this case, literally grubs. The persistent peeping of privilege: Bring me beetle larvae! Maggots, yum! For two weeks or more.

Until finally, the plumped-up progeny fling themselves out of the nest, never to return. Yet they’ve got the parents so brainwashed by this time that Mom and Dad actually keep bringing the kids food for another week or so.

After which, here we go again: Those hot-to-trot sparrows will do it all over again, two or even three times a year, sometimes four. Have they no shame? At some point don’t they have to sleep?

Our squatter-sparrow family parked their boudoir under the breezeway roof right where it meets the backdoor of our house. Which proves that house sparrows are morons, because this is the single busiest traffic lane on the property. So every time a human comes in or out, the sparrow parents freak out and flap away.

Which further proves, sparrows are chicken.

This doesn’t change after the hatchlings hatch. The cowardly parents abandon the nest just as rapidly as ever. I could be hunting ingredients for sparrow-chick pie, and they would let it happen. You might expect a mother or father to do the honorable thing and defend their newborn babies. They could flap and squawk and fly at your face and race back to their nest, but no. These cowards go swooping away to the grapevine hanging on the wall of the garage and watch from a safe distance. Eat all you want, we’ll make more. Appalling.

One family was bad enough. But then came another — a brother and sister-in-law, perhaps — moving in on the opposite side of the backdoor.

 And this year, a third family arrived, a couple feet further out along the underside of the breezeway roof.

And a fourth, now, in a crevice on the garage wall.

Not a single sparrow has checked in with me. No one has offered to pay a single speck of rent.

So I finally had enough, and I went outside to talk with one of them. The original fellow, the boldest of the bunch.

“You know this is my place, right?” I demanded.

The sparrow just looked at me.

“You know this summer we’re tearing down this old garage and building a new one, right?”

More staring.

“And this breezeway is gonna go with it.”

The sparrow cocked his little Nike-swooshed head.

“For that,” he chirped, “you’re gonna need approval from our H.O.A.”